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Jonah Lehrer at the Frontal Cortex blog on Wired discusses two recent studies about the natural curiousity of children and how it can be squelched. Following his lead, I'll make you read the post to find out what he's talking about.

NBC's Education Nation this week included a lot of the usual suspects in education reform, (yawn), but I was pleased to see Dr. Patricia Kuhl and Dr. Andrew Meltzoff, co-directors of the University of Washington's Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, talking about human brain development in the first 2,000 days of life.

The Institute is one of several centers around the country funded by the National Science Foundation to investigate the brain science of teaching and learning. The nearest center to us is the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center managed jointly by Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh.

These educational programs aim to increase science literacy and understanding as well as an interest in science among K-12 students and their teachers. This is particularly important, since the most recent trends published by the U.S. Department of Education indicate that U.S. eighth graders score lower than students from nine other countries in science knowledge and skills. The project seeks to close this gap as well as fulfill the NIH mission to ensure that adequate numbers of students are entering science education tracks and eventually pursuing careers in biomedical science.

Do you work in a science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) profession? Do you happen to like working with energetic, creative students? Then we need your help! We are looking for professionals that work in a science, technology, engineering or mathematics (STEM) field for our STEM Speaker Series.

The Akron School Board on Monday passed a resolution formally opposing HB 136, a proposal that would greatly expand the availability of vouchers in the state beyond the students who attend public schools with poor academic peformance.

The Columbus Dispatch reports that the Worthington school district doesn't like the bill either.

Stephanie Hopper of Firestone High School in Akron; Benjamin Pykare of Cuyahoga Valley Christian Academy in Cuyahoga Falls; David Hill of Western Reserve Academy in Hudson; Jordon Canedy of Buckeye High School (Medina County); Joy Sobowale of Jackson High School (Stark County) ; Hannah Christ of Hoover High School in North Canton; and Olivia Phillips of Crestwood High School in Mantua are among the Ohio semifinalists for the Nationl Achievement Scholarship.

Akron school board member Lisa Mansfield, on behalf of befuddled parents and fellow board members, asked Superintendent David James on Monday to clarify what the district means by the words ''jean-style'' pants.

The uniform policy for all kindergarten through eighth-grade children forbids jeans and ''jean-style'' pants.

Akron Public Schools is well represented in the annual Ohio Academy of Science's Governor's Thomas Edison Awards for Excellence in STEM [science,technology, engineering and math) Education.

Teachers at Akron Akron Early College, Buchtel High School, East High School, Innes Middle School, Litchfield Middle School, Miller South School for the Visual and Performing Arts, National Inventors Hall of Fame School, and Roswell-Kent Middle School are all acknowledged.

Akron Public Schools receives two settlements a year for local property taxes, one in March and one in August. Treasurer Jack Pierson reports that the August settlment of $52.9 million is down by $1.3 million over last year. About a $1 million of the shortfall is from residential taxpayers. The rest is from industrial/commercial taxpayers.

"In speaking to the Auditor's Office, they speculate (and I agree), that this new reduction we experienced is due to the increased number of taxpayers that are not able to pay," said Pierson in a letter to school officials included in the board packet for the meeting tonight.

Dorothy O. Jackson told students at Arlington Christian Academy on Friday that they should aspire to go further than she did with only a high school education.

''High school education is not enough,'' said Jackson, the first African-American woman to be appointed a deputy mayor of Akron. ''The things that I have done I probably could not do today because the competition is much stronger.''

Dorothy Jackson and Fannie Brown were among more than 500 African American HistoryMakers around the country speaking to school children this morning in the second annual "Back to school with the HistoryMakers program." HistoryMakers is the nation's largest African American video oral history archive. Here is the bio for Jackson. Here is the one for Brown, who addressed children at Lighthouse Academy, where she was named principal this week.

Here's Jackson, the first black woman to be Deputy Mayor of Akron, speaking to children at Arlington Christian Academy in East Akron this morning:

A new documentary on creationist attempts to undermine the teaching of evolution in science classes includes a raft tour of the Grand Canyon led by Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education.

The documentary (see trailer here) is a response to a national survey of high school biology teachers I referred to in February ( here and here ), which estimated that only "28 percent of those teachers consistently and 'unabashedly' introduce evidence that evolution has happened, and build lesson plans with evolution as a unifying theme linking different topics in biology."

AP is reporting that President Barack Obama will speak Friday about how the administration will sidestep No Child Left Behind, the name given to the 2001 reauthorization of the education law. Congress was supposed to re-authorize or re-write the law four years ago. Schools are supposed to achieve 100 percent proficiency on standardized tests for math and reading for all students by the 2013-2014 school year, but most schools aren't on track to do that.

In advance of Obama's speech Friday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has said states would be able to seek waivers around requirements in the law if they can meet certain requirements the White House favors. He has said the emphasis will be more on growth than actual test scores, but revealed few specifics on how the plan would work.

Just filed my story on the Father's Walk. Should be online soon. I was out at Barber elementary where they had 30 dads sign in, including Michael McCullough, who told me he walks his kids to school every day. His 9-year-old daughter Myca was just beaming when she said her dad was "awesome."

The logistics coordinator Vera Thomas said 500 dads turned out at Dunbar Primary in Tallmadge. Helen Arnold elementary in Akron had more than 100, she said.

ROOTSTOWN TWP.: The aspiring doctors and pharmacists at Northeast Ohio Medical University will share their Rootstown Township campus next year with high school freshmen attending the Bio-Med Science Academy the first school of its kind in Ohio.

The academy will be a charter school sponsored by the Rootstown school district and hosted on the university campus, which is across the street from Rootstown High School. The Rootstown school board approved resolutions Monday authorizing the creation of the school, and educators met for a four-hour retreat Tuesday afternoon at the university to learn more about it.

YouTube opens a channel for teachers. One small problem. YouTube says it's a great way to reach those "visual learners," which is a reference to the debunked notion of "learning styles." Here's cognitive pyschologist and neuroscientist Dan Willingham talking about learning styles on, of course, YouTube:

Check out my story on a new STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) school slated to open next fall on the campus of Northeast Ohio Medical University. The Bio-Med Science Academy will tack on another M for Medicine. Here's my series on what STEM education is all about.

David Dobbs' cover story about teen brains in The National Geographic nicely captures the state of research on teen brain development. ( See his blog Neuron Culture on Wired for a list of sources for the article). You probably remember some version of this story: hey, don't blame teens for that impulsive, crazy behavior...their brains aren't finished yet. Dobbs looks at it from an evolutionary point of view and reaches a different conclusion:

This view will likely sit better with teens. More important, it sits better with biology's most fundamental principle, that of natural selection. Selection is hell on dysfunctional traits. If adolescence is essentially a collection of themangst, idiocy, and haste; impulsiveness, selfishness, and reckless bumblingthen how did those traits survive selection? They couldn'tnot if they were the period's most fundamental or consequential features.

CHICAGO: An increase in child abuse, mostly in infants, is linked with the recent recession in new research that raises fresh concerns about the impact of the nation's economic woes.

The results are in a study of 422 abused children from mostly lower-income families, known to face greater risks for being abused, and the research involved just 74 counties in four states. But lead author Dr. Rachel Berger of Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh said the results confirm anecdotal reports from many pediatricians who've seen increasing numbers of shaken-baby cases and other forms of brain-injuring abuse.

Thursday, Sept. 22, is the annual Father's Walk, which encourages fathers to walk their children to school (and stay involved in their child's education year round!). Check out the Fame Fathers' website here for more information.

Clergy who want to help pass the Akron Public Schools levy on the November ballot will meet Wednesday, Sept. 21, at 9 .am. at the Ott Staff Development Center, 65 Steiner Ave. in Akron. For more information, call the Rev. Byron Arledge at 330-996-4600 or Karen Liddell-Anderson at 330-761-1661.

Humans and other animals posess an innate ability to distinguish quantities, especially 1, 2 and 3. After that, approximations get fuzzy. A squirrel knows that 10 nuts is more than three, but it couldn't discriminate between a pile that had 10 nuts and one that had 9. The French cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene calls this ability our "number sense" in his book, aptly titled, The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics.

When we teach children mathematics, we may be building on this natural born ability. (Reading, on the other hand, is a wholly human cultural invention that is achieved by rewiring existing brain circuits for a new purpose, a process Dehaene has called neuronal recycling in his more recent book Reading in the Brain: the New Science of How We Read.)

Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post's Answer Sheet education blog reads the new poverty numbers and makes the case that education reform cannot brush poverty aside as an "excuse" for low academic performance. I've got some pieces in the pipeline over the next several weeks on education and poverty that will bring this closer to home. Meanwhile, read the whole piece. She's got some great links included.

President Obama hasn't helped, nor has his Education Department, by pursuing policies that mostly ignore the effects of poverty and concentrate on business-driven reforms that involve measuring how well teachers do their jobs.

Kent State dropped slightly in U.S. News and World Report's annual rankings of top colleges nationwide, moving from 183rd to 194th place among the 200 top-ranked universities.

The magazine evaluated more than 1,500 schools nationwide based on 16 indicators of academic quality. It ranked the top 200 and listed the balance alphabetically. Last year 1,400 institutions were in the list.

Mike Williams arrived at his headquarters in the Henry's Acme plaza in the Wooster-Hawkins neighborhood about 10 minutes ago. Yellow "I like Mike" balloons are tethered to the tables and supporters are chowing down on pizza, spaghetti, subs, JoJos and more. There's jazz on the sound system and an excited buzz. Lots of kids running around wearing campaign shirts just a little long for them.

Tonight I'll be joining Stephanie Warsmith to cover the Democratic primary mayoral election tonight. She'll be with the Don Plusquellic campaign and I'll be at the Mike Williams campaign headquarters. I'll be posting updates to this blog, which will go out on Twitter and Faceboook and be re-posted on the Akron Beacon Journal's politics blog. So stay tuned to Ohio.com tonight for primary election coverage.

The day after 25-year-old Marine Cpl. Derek Wyatt was killed in Afghanistan last December, his wife Kait gave birth to the couple's only child.

On Sunday, Kait accepted the gratitude of the community as Akron commemorated the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks by dedicating the high school baseball field at Reservoir Park in Goodyear Heights to her husband's memory. Their son, 9-month-old Michael, wore a pinstripe slugger's outfit for the occasion.

Nancy Flanagan, the 1993 Michigan Teacher of the Year, writes the Teacher in a Strange Land blog for Education Week. She recently posted her own list of 10 tips for teachers returning to classrooms. They're all worth a read, but Number 5 deserves special mention:

Andrew Thomas predicted bad guys could exploit the ease of opening cockpit doors, and right he was.

Ten years after 9/11, the specialist in airline security at the University of Akron sees the skies as only a bit safer than they were a decade ago, even though ''passengers are more at risk driving to and from the airport.''

Some state officials are resisting Kent State University's appeal to charge students as much as $720 a year for new academic buildings.

Members of the Ohio Controlling Board say they worry that approval of the request would invite other tax-supported universities to ask for similar hikes. That would blow the lid off state efforts to restrain tuition and increase the number of Ohioans with a college education.

I've just added the educationtoday blog from the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development to my Google Reader to keep on International trends in education. The latest post is here:

Reading for pleasure is also associated with girls – there's a 20 percentage-point gender gap among 15-year-olds who read for enjoyment – and with socio-economic advantage – on average across OECD countries, 72% of advantaged students read for pleasure while only 56% of disadvantaged students do. And in as many as ten OECD countries, that latter gap is more than 20 percentage points wide.

"When I first heard about this situation, it seemed to me that the penalty was excessive for the offense. In addition, the penalty could exclude her from certain economic opportunities for the rest of her life. So, today I've reduced those felony convictions to what I think are the more appropriate, first degree misdemeanors. No one should interpret this as a pass-it's a second chance," said Kasich.

Ok, folks, I'm trying to sync up Twitter (you can follow me at http://Twitter.com/ABJhiggins and our Facebook Fan Page and the First Bell blog, all using Hootsuite. Consider this a test to see if everything lights up.

Akron school board member Amy Reeves Grom could not persuade the Summit County Board of Elections on Monday morning to count voters who printed their names on her ballot petitions instead of signing them in cursive.

Grom, who was running for a second term, fell 13 valid signatures short on her petitions to run for a second term in November.

Akron School Board member Amy Reeves Grom spent her Labor Day weekend with a Notary Public getting affidavits from 14 voters whose names were excluded from her petitions to run for a second four year-term in November.

She fell short of the 300 signature requirement, so she scrutinized the petition signatures to see if there were some mistakes that would break in her favor.

• Orrville High School's Class of 1976 will reunite Sept. 16-17. For information, contact Ruth Walentik-Johnston at 216-820-1439 or ruthjohnston@sbcglobal.net. The reunion website is at http://ohs76.wordpress.com.

Stark State College student Renee Weaver received a $500 scholarship from the School Nutrition Association of Ohio, a $250 scholarship from the Dietary Management Association Foundation and a $390 credit toward fees for national certification testing. She is a dietary management major who works as a cook at Faircrest Middle School in the Canton Local School District.

A union representing Revere's teachers has sued the school district over a three-year contract imposed in July over the union's objections.

The lawsuit, filed this week in Summit County Common Pleas Court, seeks an order that would prevent the district from imposing the new contract and require it to honor a 2010 agreement that includes salary increases effective Aug. 1 for this school year.

DAYTON: Teachers cannot become friendly with students on Facebook and other social networking sites and can't text or send them instant messages under a new policy in one of Ohio's largest school districts.

The Dayton Public Schools policy, which also prohibits teachers from responding to students' attempts at communicating through any personal or professional accounts not approved by the district, was adopted after consulting with the Ohio School Boards Association, the Dayton Daily News reported.